Identification of Non-Routine Tours in Everyday Travel Behavior

This paper deals with the distinction between everyday and tourism related travel. As no objective definition exists to differentiate between these two, surveys usually focus only on one aspect. In particular, this does not provide an overall picture of tourism related travel as some tourism activities are also embedded in everyday life, such as day excursions. However, it is of high relevance to distinguish these types of travel as policy measures may influence these aspects of travel differently and motivations and backgrounds to perform such travel are different. According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), tourism activities take place outside the usual environment of people. In this paper, we approach this subjective definition of a personal environment using data of the German mobility panel. Analyzing the data of three reported weeks of everyday travel behavior per person, we calculate personal thresholds to approach an individual usual environment to decide which part of everyday travel behavior is outside of this environment and thus called non-routine. For this decision, we present a stepwise heuristic that finally distinguishes between routine and non-routine behavior for each tour of a person. ... mehrUsing one heuristic version for analysis, we identify 8.56% of all tours as non-routine. This corresponds to 9.57% of all reported trips but accounts for 33.44% of distances travelled in our dataset. Young people and students have the lowest share of non-routine tours. The opposite was found among pensioners and older age groups who have the highest shares of non-routine behavior.